Devil's advocate. If you had a fully loaded AR15 Pistol, a P.O.S. KelTek 9mm and a S&W Sheild....

How many rounds could you fire in 14 minutes???

Just saying. FULLY armed guards posted at EVERY school is the only way to stop one of these sick F's.

SROs and armed school staff, many schools have gone this route..

not many, if the armed guards are well trained. You just think you are a taticool bad arse until you run into someone with much better training. its a short fire fight

but yes no opposition 14 min is a long time

14 minutes beat the living daylights otta the over an hour response in Uvalde. But, I get it, that a response team on scene would have been faster.

The people that commit these atrocities aren't well trained, they aren't even tacticool bad arses. I would think that even a weekend warrior that had little formal training would have no problem eliminating these sick F's as long as they could control their fear.

I agree. For anyone who even knows how to halfway use their weapons, 14 minutes is an eternity, and it is about as good as you can hope for in a response time. I used to be opposed to turning schools into fortresses, but I think I am changing my opinion on that. The threat response needs to be onsite.

GREAT answers !!

I know it will freak students out to see men and women dressed in full battle armored uniforms with fully auto M6's, he77 maybe a S.A.W. (kinda heavy). But when these soldiers are nice and talk to the kids like they are just normal police, the kids AND teachers will feel much safer.

Unfortunately, this day and age of this F'd up morality. We are NOT the same country we used to be. Maybe one day we will return to Greatness.


Money to pay them???? No limits!!! it would be just a portion of what the Democrats are giving away.

If we lock schools down, like we do airports and courtrooms, we can stop school shootings. Metal detect every entrant. Arming some of the staff would help.

But if we do, they will just show up at McDonald's, the cinemas or the bowling alley. If you stop firearm sales they will use cars, trucks, something else to kill innocent people.

The ACLU forced the closing of many of our mental health facilities. Our cities are now covered with unstable, drug addicted homeless.

Solutions don't come easy.

14 minutes, I guess that's not too bad, and they stopped the threat. Here's how I think about it. There are 9330 public schools in Texas. We can pay to have trained personnel at every school, some schools would need one, some would need 2, maybe 3. Most small schools would need one. On average, let's say there are double the amount trained personnel than schools, so 18,660 trained officers. Pay them about 65,000 a year, would be $1.2 Billion in funds. Provide them a quality AR-15 and optic, about $1500 each, and gear, of about another $500 or so. That's about $37 Million. Total, that's about $1.25 Billion for Texas to pay to have multiple armed and trained personnel on site at every Texas public school. You could cut down the response time and have a show of force already there. It turns a soft target location into hard target location and should decrease the attempts of school shootings. Why can't we push for something like this!!??

Where do I vote for this?

This is very true. I would, however, like to get the schools locked down. If they start targeting Mickey Ds and cinemas, at least there might be people there that can defend themselves. Kids can't.

You can legally defend yourself at mcdonalds, cinema, or bowling alley. You can't legally defend yourself at a school. Having society's most innocent members gathered together in a defenseless setting with nobody there to protect them is beyond asinine.

Anywhere the government doesn't allow you to carry a gun, they should provide protection. I go past armed guards and a metal detector at an airport and court house...not sure why schools are treated differently.

Locked doors and entrances with metal detectors did nothing to stop this shooter. She shot through locked doors with windows in seconds.

Build your security in layers. School properties need to be fenced and gated. An armed security professional should be checking IDs or Credentials long before anyone gets to the actual school building.
I was in OK last week at a very secure customer job site. I went through two fenced check points before I ever got to the building where the meeting was. Just sayin!

My brother is a teacher, and we have discussed this. Most students know how to get passed metal detectors and enter the school from an unmonitored entrance. My son, who's a senior, talks about how easy it is to get into the school from many of the locked doors. The locked doors and forced entry points "should" help, but it's not a fail safe.

On the armed staff. Yes, I think this is a good option, but only where it can apply. My brother would be very capable to be an armed teacher. But he is also in the heavy minority when it comes to teachers and guns. I don't know how many teachers are anti-gun and democrat, who have never fired a weapon and are against firearms to begin with. But I would say 60%-80% of teachers would fit this category. Of the remaining 20%-40%, I would think that many of them would decline to be an armed. But, if a teacher chose to be armed, I don't think I would want them to have it on their person. I would recommend the firearm be locked up in their desk or something similar, so that students couldn't over take them and take their firearm.

But there has to be a way to turn a school into more of a hard target. We need to start moving in this direction.

I only disagree with you on one point. The teacher should keep it on their person. If a student is trying to overtake a teacher and remove said teacher's firearm, then that student is now a threat, and should be dealt with just like the student that brought a firearm to school. Keeping a firearm locked in a desk opens up the possibility of a student breaking into said desk while there is no teacher in the room to stop them.

With a semi-auto only I'm pretty sure I could fire off about 1100 rounds in 14 minutes if I was able to do it from multiple guns.

Really top quality tactical training can be had very inexpensively and you can learn the fundamentals in two days if you're a quick learner. After you've learned the basics you need to practice at least once per week to hone your skills and do so for the rest of your life if you want to maintain those skills.

Yes, we talked about this option, also.

Texas has a program
https://www.tcole.texas.gov/content/school-marshals

Not enough are using it
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/07/texas-school-marshal-program/

Kids are getting their "training" from video games. Games today are very realistic and have basic and advanced tactics built into them. Not hard to figure out Hell, LE use video training to some degree as well. JMO of course.

Do the teachers have a say in it? I don't think so. The School board has to approve the program before the teacher has any say in whether they want to carry in school.

You run a business but didn't account for any overhead? Health insurance, taxes, admin, etc. Also, we can't find enough people to be cops at $65k, where is TX finding 19000 people to do this? You probably need to nearly triple your entire budget. Call it $4 billion, around 2% of our current state budget. Sales tax revenue in 2022 was $43B, so you would have to raise sales tax 10% if you wanted to fund it that way.

Probably not near as freaked out as when a freak is trying to kill them. They'll get over armed security real quick.

Seems to be plenty of money in the budget for $50m+ football stadiums. Maybe we should re-evaluate our priorities.

I like what you are proposing, but your numbers are way low. You are going to need a minimum of 2 officers at every small school to cover things like vacations, sick time, Dr's appt's, the training you expect them to have ... Large high schools and middle schools will need even more because the campus is larger and someone would need to cover the sporting events that occur after school (unless you are expecting the SRO's to work from 6AM to 9-10PM when after school activities end and also pretty much every Saturday). So in reality, you are probably talking about needing an amount of SRO's that's 4x the number of schools. You will then probably need another 25% on top of that number for admin/management staff to support all those new officers. Add to that the facilities that will need to be built to support all of this, transportation for all of this, extra guns/ammo that will be needed to cover training, normal breakage/wear-and-tear ... Some of those things may already exist, and maybe you can re-purpose the existing SRO staff, but a lot of it will be new. The last thing I would add is that 65K a year is only the SRO's salary. When you add in the benefits package, a 65K salaried employee is probably closer to 90K. Then you have to remember that this is not a 1 time cost. So at a minimum on the people side, you have now added a large re-occurring cost that will only go up every year as wages/benefits increase. Lastly, this would have to be state funded because you aren't going to get every single school district to pass the property tax increase to fund it. So to throw out some numbers, 9330 schools, 37K SRO's, 9K administration, 90K per person = 4.1B for salary/benefit costs. Then you will need to add all the training/equipment/facility/transportation costs and you are probably closer to 5.5-6B per year, every year.

Like I said, I like the idea, but it's not a small cost for the state of Texas to pick up (you won't get federal funds for this).

If only we could get the two of you into office down in Austin. Then you two could hash this out and we would have new legislation by the end of the week. The real issue would not be cost. The real issue would be getting congressmen to vote for armed security in school.